Phish - Hampton Comes Alive December 10, 1999 - Detroit Free Press By Brian McCollum Album Review - Hampton Comes Alive The myth goes something like this: Rock music, in its purest form, is ideally executed onstage. It's an appealing notion. There's something romantic in the idea that rock is a folk art best interpreted in the volatile setting of a live venue - a rarefied rite of communal ecstasy tweaked with a touch of danger. It's also wrong - most of the time. Rock-and-roll is most decidedly a studio craft, born of the merger between technology, capitalism, and American culture. The real rock-and-roll catharsis is a solitary experience, shared by a listener and his album or radio. That doesn't mean there aren't transcendent moments onstage. Indeed, for the bands that can handle it - the players with real chops - live performance is a place for channeling high spirits. Take Metallica and Phish. Metallica's slyly titled "S&M" - that's "Symphony & Metallica" - is a two-disc retrospective of the group's program last spring with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. If it's the first Metallica album that earns the adjective "gorgeous," so be it: Gorgeous it is, as the group weaves its snarling canon into a rich fabric of new sounds. Swells of strings cascade for genuine drama (just check the coda on "For Whom the Bell Tolls"); elsewhere the orchestra provides subtle counterpoint to Metallica's familiar dark roar. It's easy for rock-orchestra collaborations to choke on their own pretension, from the Moody Blues on down. Here it's tastefully executed, as the symphony doesn't so much co-opt the sound as enhance it. Vermont jam quintet Phish inspires a nearly obsessive devotion among its fans, who get quite a handful with the six-disc opus "Hampton Comes Alive," recorded last fall. The group's penchant for sonic exploration is manifest here, with giddy improv oozing out of songs like "Possum" and "Farmhouse," along with a playful cover of Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping." Perhaps too unwieldy for the casual listener, the set will certainly satiate a hard-core Phish fetish. Review © 1999 Detroit Free Press